Reliability of Wikipedia

This is an encyclopedic article discussing Wikipedia's reliability. For Wikipedia's own standpoint on reliability, see Wikipedia:General disclaimer.

A South American coati. In July 2008, a 17-year-old student added an invented nickname to the Wikipedia article coati as a private joke, calling them "Brazilian aardvarks". The false information lasted for six years and was propagated by hundreds of websites, several newspapers, and even a few books published by university presses.[1][2]

The reliability of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition, has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors, who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process.[3] The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes. Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; its English-language edition has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.[4][5][6]

Article instability and susceptibility to cognitive biases are two potential problem areas in a crowdsourced work like Wikipedia.

Select assessments of its reliability have examined how quickly vandalism—content perceived by editors to constitute false or misleading information—is removed. Two years after the project was started, in 2004, an IBM study found that "vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly—so quickly that most users will never see its effects".[7][8] The inclusion of false or fabricated content has, at times, lasted for years on Wikipedia due to its volunteer editorship.[9][10] Its editing model facilitates multiple systemic biases, namely selection bias, inclusion bias, participation bias, and group-think bias. The majority of the encyclopedia is written by male editors, leading to a gender bias in coverage, and the make up of the editing community has prompted concerns about racial bias, spin bias, corporate bias, and national bias, among others.[11][12][13] An ideological bias on Wikipedia has also been identified on both conscious and subconscious levels. A series of studies from Harvard Business School in 2012 and 2014 found Wikipedia "significantly more biased" than Encyclopædia Britannica but attributed the finding more to the length of the online encyclopedia as opposed to slanted editing.[14][15]

Instances of non-neutral or conflict-of-interest editing and the use of Wikipedia for "revenge editing" has attracted attention to false, biased, or defamatory content in articles, especially biographies of living people.[16][17] Articles on less technical subjects, such as the social sciences, humanities, and culture, have been known to deal with misinformation cycles, cognitive biases, coverage discrepancies, and editor disputes. The online encyclopedia does not guarantee the validity of its information. It is seen as a valuable "starting point" for researchers when they pass over content to examine the listed references, citations, and sources. Academics suggest reviewing reliable sources when assessing the quality of articles.[18][19]

Its coverage of medical and scientific articles such as pathology,[20] toxicology,[21] oncology,[22] pharmaceuticals,[23] and psychiatry[24] were compared to professional and peer-reviewed sources in a 2005 Nature study.[25] A year later Encyclopædia Britannica disputed the Nature study, whose authors, in turn, replied with a further rebuttal.[26][27] Concerns regarding readability and the overuse of technical language were raised in studies published by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (2011),[28] Psychological Medicine (2012),[24] and European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology (2014).[29] The Simple English Wikipedia serves as a simplified version of articles to make complex articles more accessible to the layperson on a given topic in Basic English. Wikipedia's popularity, mass readership, and free accessibility has led the encyclopedia to command a substantial second-hand cognitive authority across the world.[30][31][nb 1]

  1. ^ Randall, Eric (May 19, 2014). "How a raccoon became an aardvark". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on December 29, 2016. Retrieved November 24, 2016.
  2. ^ Kolbe, Andreas (January 16, 2017). "Happy birthday: Jimbo Wales' sweet 16 Wikipedia fails. From aardvark to Bicholim, the encylopedia [sic] of things that never were". The Register. Archived from the original on July 8, 2017. Retrieved June 4, 2017.
  3. ^ Seelye, Katharine Q. (December 5, 2005). "Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar". The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 7, 2014. Retrieved February 23, 2017.
  4. ^ "Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher". The Economist. January 9, 2021. Archived from the original on January 8, 2021. Retrieved February 25, 2021.
  5. ^ Cooke, Richard (February 17, 2020). "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet". Wired. Archived from the original on January 10, 2021. Retrieved October 13, 2020.
  6. ^ "Happy Birthday, Wikipedia". The Economist. January 9, 2021. Archived from the original on January 8, 2021. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
  7. ^ Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Kushal Dave: Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations Archived January 25, 2006, at the Wayback Machine. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 575–582, Vienna 2004, ISBN 1-58113-702-8
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference History flow: results was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference TimesFrenchWPHoax was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference SeigenthalerUSAToday was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Torres, Nicole (June 2, 2016). "Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?". Harvard Business Review. ISSN 0017-8012. Archived from the original on June 17, 2020. Retrieved June 26, 2020.
  12. ^ Cassano, Jay (January 29, 2015). "Black History Matters, So Why Is Wikipedia Missing So Much Of It?". Fast Company. Archived from the original on May 10, 2015. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
  13. ^ Cooke, Richard (January 2, 2020). "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Archived from the original on January 10, 2021. Retrieved January 2, 2020.
  14. ^ Frick, Walter (December 3, 2014). "Wikipedia Is More Biased Than Britannica, but Don't Blame the Crowd". Harvard Business Review. ISSN 0017-8012. Archived from the original on June 26, 2020. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
  15. ^ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (January 1, 2012). "Is Wikipedia Biased?". American Economic Review. 103. Harvard Business School. Archived from the original on December 30, 2019. Retrieved June 26, 2020.
  16. ^ Leonard, Andrew (May 17, 2013). "Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia". Salon. Archived from the original on May 31, 2016. Retrieved June 4, 2016.
  17. ^ Pinsker, Joe (August 11, 2015). "The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on June 1, 2016. Retrieved June 4, 2016.
  18. ^ Petiška, Eduard; Moldan, Bedřich (December 9, 2019). "Indicator of quality for environmental articles on Wikipedia at the higher education level". Journal of Information Science. 47 (2): 269–280. doi:10.1177/0165551519888607. ISSN 0165-5515. S2CID 214401940.
  19. ^ Harrison, Stephen (March 19, 2020). "The Coronavirus Is Stress-Testing Wikipedia's Systems—and Editors". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on April 18, 2020. Retrieved July 10, 2020.
  20. ^ Wood, A; Struthers, K (2010). "Pathology education, Wikipedia and the Net generation". Medical Teacher. 32 (7): 618–620. doi:10.3109/0142159X.2010.497719. PMID 20653388. We have identified Wikipedia as an informative and accurate source for Pathology education and believe that Wikipedia is potentially an important learning tool for of the 'Net Generation'.
  21. ^ Cite error: The named reference Tox09 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  22. ^ Leithner, A; Maurer-Ertl, W; Glehr, M; Friesenbichler, J; Leithner, K; Windhager, R (July–August 2010). "Wikipedia and osteosarcoma: a trustworthy patients' information?". Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 17 (4): 373–4. doi:10.1136/jamia.2010.004507. PMC 2995655. PMID 20595302.
  23. ^ Cite error: The named reference Drug08 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  24. ^ a b Reavley, N. J.; MacKinnon, A. J.; Morgan, A. J.; Alvarez-Jimenez, M.; Hetrick, S. E.; Killackey, E.; Nelson, B.; Purcell, R.; Yap, M. B. H.; Jorm, A. F. (2011). "Quality of information sources about mental disorders: A comparison of Wikipedia with centrally controlled web and printed sources". Psychological Medicine. 42 (8): 1753–1762. doi:10.1017/S003329171100287X. hdl:11343/59260. PMID 22166182. S2CID 13329595.
  25. ^ Giles, J. (2005). "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head: Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries". Nature. 438 (7070): 900–1. Bibcode:2005Natur.438..900G. doi:10.1038/438900a. PMID 16355180. The study (which was not in itself peer-reviewed) was cited in many news articles such as this: "Wikipedia survives research test". BBC News. BBC. December 15, 2005. Archived from the original on August 7, 2012. Retrieved July 18, 2006.
  26. ^ Nature (March 30, 2006). "Nature's responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica". Nature.com. Archived from the original on November 5, 2006. Retrieved March 19, 2012.
  27. ^ Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature. Archived July 9, 2016, at the Wayback Machine Encyclopædia Britannica, March 2006
  28. ^ Rajagopalan, M. S.; Khanna, V. K.; Leiter, Y.; Stott, M.; Showalter, T. N.; Dicker, A. P.; Lawrence, Y. R. (2011). "Patient-Oriented Cancer Information on the Internet: A Comparison of Wikipedia and a Professionally Maintained Database". Journal of Oncology Practice. 7 (5): 319–323. doi:10.1200/JOP.2010.000209. PMC 3170066. PMID 22211130.
  29. ^ Azer, S. A. (2014). "Evaluation of gastroenterology and hepatology articles on Wikipedia". European Journal of Gastroenterology & Hepatology. 26 (2): 155–63. doi:10.1097/MEG.0000000000000003. PMID 24276492. S2CID 7760287.
  30. ^ Barnett, David (February 17, 2018). "Can we trust Wikipedia? 1.4 billion people can't be wrong". The Independent. Archived from the original on February 11, 2019. Retrieved July 15, 2021.
  31. ^ Mak, Aaron (May 28, 2019). "Inside the Brutal, Petty War Over Donald Trump's Wikipedia Page". Slate. Archived from the original on June 15, 2021. Retrieved July 15, 2020.


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